This Changes Everything

Greetings. I have a felicitous essay with which you can begin your new year.

I have just finished the manuscript of a seventh book that I hope to publish next year (2026), if I find a publisher this year (2025). This is in addition to my sixth book, Forgotten Landscapes, which is scheduled for release July 2025. But right now I want to tell you a little about the seventh book, Every Plant Has a Story.

There are lots of books about botany for the general reader. But almost all of them are about why humans should appreciate plants, e.g., they are sources of food, spices, hallucinogens, etc. That is, plants as slaves of humans. But my book is about the stories the plants tell about themselves, as discovered by scientific research. I will not attempt to summarize it here, but will probably do so a bit at a time in the essays I will post in the coming year.

Every plant has a different story of success in the ruthless Darwinian world of competition. One example is that some plants grow as long-lived trees, while others are short-lived weeds. The long-lived trees (like oak trees) invest a lot of time and energy in building up for the future. They are tremendously successful, but it takes centuries for them to earn back the costs that it took them to build themselves. They epitomize long-term investment. Weeds, on the other hand, do not have a long term. They grow like crazy for, in most cases, a single year, then pour all their resources into seed production. There are all stages in between, such as short-lived trees (like cottonwoods).

Above: sequoia trees invest for long-term success, over millennia; below, weeds such as velvetleaf invest for success only one year into the future, then they die.

Weeds specialize on temporary habitats, such as an area disturbed by fire, flood, or human activity. Trees specialize on habitats that remain stable for many decades, even centuries. Since the Earth contains both kinds of habitats, stable and temporary, the weed approach to investing and the tree approach are both successful, in different places.

The analogy with the human economy is inescapable. You can either invest for the long term, building up savings and assets, preparing for the future. You can manage your life like a tree. Or you can spend quickly and go into debt, as if you have no future. You can be a weed. It is the people who live like trees who make the world a better place, who stabilize it. But there are plenty of people who live like weeds also.

Humans are, however, changing the global climate. Not just heating it up, through the greenhouse effect, but creating a climate that is wildly catastrophic—fires, hurricanes, floods, and all the rest. The entire world now has or will soon have an unstable climate, everywhere. Plants that make long-term investments, such as trees, may not live long enough to be successful. Only weeds, which often live just a year, can survive in a world where the climate changes rapidly. No longer will tree investments and weed investments both be successful at different times and places. Now only the weeds will succeed. I summarize this situation in the last chapter of my book: Trees are out, weeds are in.

Trees are out, weeds are in. This means that if you expect to see old forests with big trees, you’d better see them right away. And then prepare to live in a world in which there are no plants except those that grow and die rapidly. Someday, the giant sequoia forests of California, where huge trees live for millennia, will be regarded as part of a mythological past.

The analogy with human investments is again inescapable. Long-term investments, in which a corporation plans to be a stable force for good over many decades, are on their way out. Short-term investments, to make a killing rather than a living, will soon dominate the economy of the world. Only the long term allows a corporation to invest in reputation: we are a company you can trust for life, we want you to like us. Instead, corporations will all be rewarded for being rapacious, treating their customers like garbage, and they don’t care who knows it. Yes, we dump our wastes into the common space in which we all live; yes, we deny your insurance claims; no, you cannot expect us to actually honor our contracts.  In a truly free economy, consumers can choose to stay away from dishonest corporations. But in many cases, when a corporation treats its customers like garbage, and it starts to collapse, the government will come in and rescue it, or else it will merge with another corporation. Corporations lose their recognizable identities, so you cannot choose to stay away from them. The future of the human world, as of the natural world, will be wildly swerving among disasters, in which you cannot responsibly plan ahead.

I wrote the rest of this essay in my science blog. Now, for something of direct interest to readers of the religion blog. The old-time religion is dying also. Time was when Christianity meant to live a life of responsibility to God and service to humankind. To make the world better. To live like trees. But that is no longer what conservative Christianity, in its unbridled worship of Donald Trump, is. In the new-time religion, conservative Christianity is where charismatic leaders get their hypnotized followers to give them money, with which they pursue sinful lifestyles, and tell everybody to worship Trump instead of Jesus. They are the weeds of the religious world, whose only interest is quick profit. They have always been with us; but now they have dominated the religious world.

I have been reading Naomi Klein’s 2014 This Changes Everything. She makes it abundantly clear that our world economy cannot possibly avoid climate-related collapse. Any company, or country, that invests in the future rather than in immediate profitability is swept aside. Countries, companies, and individuals who choose sustainability are usually beaten down. Unless solar energy is, without subsidies, cheaper than government-subsidized fossil fuel energy, it will be driven into extinction. The time is coming, soon, when sustainability will be essentially illegal. By choosing to spend less money, I am making myself an enemy of the consumerist economy. I am basing this view on Klein’s 2014 numbers. It is much worse today.

I was expecting that my seventh book would be a cheerful celebration of the diversity of plant adaptations even to the most challenging environments. I did not plan for it to be an activist book. The time is past when I delude myself into thinking that any book I could possibly write would change the views of any readers who did not already agree with me. But, despite my plans, my seventh book has become an activist book, a voice of a prophet in the wilderness, from what the short-horizon leaders of the world economy think of as the extreme left.

This represents an almost complete departure from everything I wrote in previous years. Before, I was hoping to help change the world. Now, I just want those of you who care about the long-term well-being of humankind to feel a little better about the way you are living.

Trees are out; weeds are in. Happy New Year.

Vanishing Utopias

We all know that utopias cannot ever exist. But, according to historian Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, we keep getting closer to it. In fact, our approach to it is accelerating.

It is a long book, almost 500 pages, but it covers the entirety of human prehistory and history, up until the present day, which for the author was 2014. You will not find lists of empires and dates. In this way, it is almost the exact opposite of what is still perhaps the most famous overview of world history, the Outline of History by H. G. Wells.

Instead, the author seeks general trends and explanations for everything that has happened. Here is an example. Why did human evolution seem to proceed so slowly before the arrival of modern humans? For example, Homo ergaster stone tools in Africa remained unchanged for a million years. Harari says that all other animal species, and all humans before Homo sapiens, have or had a biological constraint on their ability to think of new ways of living. Before the human lineage could make any progress, we needed an innovation, invisible in bones and DNA, which allowed us to imagine the future. Neanderthals, for example, he said, did not have “the ability to compose fiction.”

But the author suffers from the delusion of technological optimism, which is very common among writers of popular sociology. Here are two examples which considerably erode the credibility of the conclusion of the book.

First, he seems to assume we will never run out of energy. This is because we invest some of the profits from the old kinds of energy into developing new ones. This has, in fact, happened. One obvious example is that England was running out of wood, so they invested money and research into using coal, which required the invention of the steam engine. Before modern times, all energy was either from burning wood or from human and animal muscle power. Medieval people did not even imagine steam, hydroelectric, or atomic power.

But this will happen only if we deliberately invest in new technology. Right now we need to invest in green technologies such as wind and solar energy. We have done so, but powerful ideological and political forces oppose the adoption of green technology. Donald Trump has made it very clear that his solution to our future energy needs is to pump more oil. Technology will not save us, because Trump will lead us boldly into the twentieth century.

Harari also speculated that wars were becoming rare. It is true that there were fewer wars in 2014 than there had ever been in the past. This was easy to believe in the balmy days of the Obama administration. But almost as soon as Harari’s book was published, Putin decided to invade the Ukraine, for reasons that are not clear even to his supporters, who do not dare to have an independent opinion; and Harari’s own country, Israel, is waging what many observers claim to be a war of extermination against the Palestinians.

Harari even speculated about how to be happy. Happiness is, he said, the product of serotonin levels in the brain. No matter what your external circumstances happen to be, no matter if you are in pain or slavery, you will be happy if you have a lot of serotonin. I think this opinion is a product of the author’s scarcely-hidden admiration for Buddhism. And, he implies, serotonin levels are not only biologically determined—you are either a happy or a depressed person—but also remain unchanged during your life. But this is true only for people who are clinically depressed. They need more serotonin but I do not. Also, I am certain that I am happier now, having completed so many of my life goals, than I was back when I had no idea if my future would be successful.

We need to admit that lots of things are getting better—the same message as Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature—but that we still have a lot of work to do and our success is not assured.

We all live in imagined realities. Despite the absence of evidence for spiritual realities, we will be individually unhappy and collective failures if we live in the way the apostle Paul described in one of his epistles: Eat, drink, for tomorrow we die. We have to at least imagine that we can make the world better.

The Stars in their Courses

This is from an email I wanted to send to the office of the Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Ryan Walters. However, neither he nor the department had any way for the public to contact them. They hand down their decisions from an undefiled lofty summit, without any input from the public they supposedly represent.

Walters has become infamous for mandating that all Oklahoma Public School classrooms teach from the Bible, and he means this literally. He has sought bids for the state to buy 55,000 Bibles to distribute among Oklahoma classrooms. But to my knowledge he has not provided any guidance about how to do this in a manner that is acceptable to him, personally.

I pushed the limits of truth in this letter. I retired from public university teaching in Oklahoma. My university classroom would not, itself, have been required to teach from the Bible. I taught biology and evolution, not astronomy, but there was some cosmology and astronomy in my courses.

“Dear Superintendent Walters,

“I have been an Oklahoma science teacher for many years. Among the subjects that I have taught are biology and astronomy.

“In order to comply with your order, I would have to use the Bible as the basis for astronomy. I assume from what I have heard that you are a creationist who accepts the recent miraculous creation of the Earth. But that is not what I am writing about.

“Instead, my understanding is that even creationist astronomy does not include astrology, that is, the belief that stars and planets directly influence human affairs.

“Imagine my surprise when I re-discovered Judges 5:20. (I have read the Bible twice, but I forgot about this verse.) Judges is a book, which you would consider historical (it is not psalms, proverbs, or prophecy) about the Israelite conquest of Canaan. This passage is from the victory song of Deborah (a woman army leader) and Barak about a recent Israelite victory over the Canaanites. It reads, “From heaven fought the stars, from their courses they fought against Sisera.”

“Am I supposed to teach that astrology is, under some circumstances, true? If so, perhaps the state should also require classroom horoscopes and, if so, your department would issue the official horoscopes for public school use.

“If, instead, you consider this passage to be poetic allusion, then I would have no difficulty with this passage. However, how is a public school teacher to decide which Biblical passages are literal and which are poetic allusion? Your department should also issue official guidelines about this as well, perhaps an official state manual for Bible interpretation.

“Could you help me out in my confusion?”

There is much legal uncertainty about whether Walters will have to rescind his command for public school Bible instruction.

Gutenberg and Printing: A View from Strasbourg

Strasbourg, France, where I now live, is justly proud of Johannes Gutenberg (about 1406-1468), who invented the printing press. He was born in Mainz, nearby in what is now Germany, and returned to it later, but his crucial first steps in developing the printing press were taken in Strasbourg, where a statue and a plaza commemorate him. I have posted a YouTube video, from Strasbourg, France, about Gutenberg.

One would think that Gutenberg’s idea for a printing press would have been a flash of insight that everyone would have immediately appreciated. But he did his initial work as a sideline and without funding from other people, as far as we know. His main work seems to have been as a goldsmith, polishing gems, and making mirrors. He got his idea for the printing press from another kind of press: the wine-press, which removed juice from grapes. Perhaps if he had just stuck to his polishing and mirrors, or had gone into the wine-press business, he might have had fewer financial setbacks. At least, the return on investment was very slow. His few major investors sued him. But, if Gutenberg had not persisted, the world would not have had what is now widely considered one of its most important inventions.

As a result of the printing press, ideas could now be publicized through a large number of copies, rather than copied by hand or by meticulous engravings that were affordable only for illustrations. Gutenberg developed an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony that could be melted and re-used. The greater number of copies allowed the written ideas to spread more widely and gain a recognition that they would not otherwise have had, or had only after a long delay.

 

 

Some examples of such ideas, themselves changing the course of history, are depicted on panels on the Gutenberg monument. One of them shows the signing of the American Declaration of Independence, with a Gutenberg press squarely and symbolically in the middle of the Continental Congress. Copies of the Declaration then spread around the world, where they stirred the ideas of liberty and democracy more than any handwritten document could have done.

 

Another example is the idea of emancipation of slaves and the end of the institution of slavery. Were it not for the printing press, relatively few people would have been aware of how cruel a system slavery was. Anti-slavery documents stirred the hearts of good people and embarrassed those who owned or profited from slavery. This plaque graphically depicts the cruelty of slavery.

Another example is education. The ideas and works of all kinds of intellectuals, from Descartes to Kant to Mozart to Milton to Newton, might have been lost had it not been for the printing press making their creations widely available. As the plaque shows, it was almost entirely white male creators who benefited from this, but the spread of knowledge was a process which, once started, could not be restrained.

 

Who knows what great ideas might be lost even today because, even if published, go unnoticed. How much worse it would be had there been no way to publish them. This shows the important role that chance plays in evolutionary adaptation (in this case, cultural evolution).

Happiness Is Fill in the Blank

I’ve been looking through a dull but well-intentioned book from 1937, 101 of the World’s Greatest Books. That is, five to ten page summaries of them. They were the ones you would expect from the era which continued with Great Books of the Western World, whose numerous volumes filled many library shelves even in small towns because teachers and librarians thought these were the books that everyone ought to know about to be considered educated. Great novels, epic stories, great scholarly works, great plays, great works of philosophy, almost all of which were outdated even in 1937. I wasn’t expecting much, not having much interest in the classical authors (Dante was especially silly), but just in case I missed something, I wanted to check.

Rather than to discuss the summaries of the “great” philosophers, which would lull you to sleep, I have chosen one narrow question: What is happiness?

Aristotle answered this question in a prolonged and painful contemplation of the obvious. His was the doctrine of the golden mean, which says that happiness is where you have enough, but not too much, of everything, from wealth to strength. Is there anyone who didn’t already know this? Some people act as if the right amount of sexual pleasure is as much as possible, but even they get worn out once in a while, and they will probably admit this. Some people act as if the right amount of sexual pleasure is none at all, not even accidental thoughts of sex. They are not happy, protestations notwithstanding. But the vast majority of humans already live by the doctrine of the golden mean. I certainly do.

While the golden mean seems obvious, there are lots of people who say that happiness is different for every person. Let me cite, rather than a philosopher, the mid-century musician Ray Coniff, whose song said that “Happiness is different things to different people” (“To a beatnik, it’s a beard, beard, beard…”) In the 1960s, when as a little kid I was absorbing television, I heard the tobacco corporation version: “To a landlord, it’s a great big rent, to a smoker, it’s a Kent.” (I’ve never heard this song on the radio since the 1960s. I assume the tobacco company bought the rights to the original song and is hoarding them.)

I think we all, regardless of philosophy or religion, know that there must be some universals to happiness (except among psychopaths). And, I maintain, many of these universals match the behaviors and feelings produced in our species by evolution. We can only be truly happy when we can honestly feel we are doing the right things with our lives—that is, altruism. We actually enjoy being good (up to a point), and having allies rather than having only enemies and competitors. And having a sense of purpose—which is also the product of evolution—and not just disconnected events.

Happiness is, therefore, not just whatever rings our bells, or floats our boats, or tickles our fancy, or verbs our object. It is a product of evolution, just like language and toenails and the cockles of your heart.